Britain is said to be the most haunted country on earth, and every ghost needs a house. I took the 260 reportedly haunted places in Britain and Ireland that Wikipedia records and set them against the 40,409 buildings the heritage lists rank highest. Is a haunted place just an old place?
The usual answer to "why is it haunted?" is "because it is old". Old walls have seen more deaths, more grief, more secrets; old stairs creak. If that were the whole story, the haunted places of Britain should look like a fair sample of its old buildings: the same kinds of building, of the same age, spread across the country in the same way.
So I tested it. English Wikipedia files 260 places in Britain and Ireland under "reportedly haunted locations", in its categories and lists. I placed each on the map, sorted it by kind (castle, house, inn, church, theatre, gaol, airfield, road, wood) and found its date where Wikidata or the article gives one. Then I set them against the 40,409 Grade I, Grade II* and Category A listed buildings in Wikidata, the buildings the heritage lists rank as most important, along with Britain's pubs and castles.
The short answer is no. Haunted buildings are, if anything, only a little older than listed buildings of the same kind, and not by a margin that luck could not produce. What sets them apart is what they are. Castles are 9.0 times and inns 8.5 times as common among haunted buildings as among listed ones. Churches, a third of all listed buildings, are almost absent. And Scotland, with its tower houses, has 2.9 times as many haunted places per listed building as England.
Each dot is a place, coloured by kind; open rings are roads, woods, hills and whole villages. Pick a ghost from the menu to light up the places whose story mentions it. Tap any dot for the sentence that makes it haunted, its date and its listing, and how I placed it. 256 of the 260 could be placed; 188 at the building itself, the rest at the village, town or stretch of road their source names.
The map is lopsided in an instructive way. Scotland holds 85 of the 241 places in Great Britain (35%) but only 16% of the listed buildings. Wales has just ten. Ireland has 17 places and Northern Ireland two, which says more about which countries' ghosts reached this English-language list than about the ghosts.
Of the 199 haunted buildings in Great Britain, 67 are castles or towers: 34%, against 3.7% of the 33,720 listed buildings. Inns, pubs and hotels make up 20% of haunted buildings and 2.4% of listed ones. Houses, halls and palaces are common in both (28% and 39%). The great exception is the church: 35% of the listed buildings are churches, chapels or abbeys, but only eight of the haunted buildings, 4%.
The small kinds follow the same line. Theatres (six), gaols (five) and RAF stations and other military sites (eight) are each far commoner among the haunted than among the listed, though the numbers are tiny. These are places of crowds, confinement and sudden death, or of performance. Churches, which have the oldest fabric of all and stand in burial grounds, are where Wikipedia's ghosts are least likely to be. When a church does appear, it is usually a ruin or an abbey: Furness, Beaulieu, Netley, Malmesbury.
The ghost story belongs to the castle and the inn: places with a host, a visitor and a night to get through.
Part of this is simple: castles and inns are places people stay the night in, and places that sell stories. Many of the haunted inns and castle hotels advertise their ghosts. But it also matches what the stories themselves are about, as the cast in section 05 shows.
I could date 88 places: 45 from Wikidata's inception date and 43 from the year in the article's infobox. Wikidata has an inception date for 6,982 of the listed buildings. Comparing raw dates would be unfair, because a castle is usually older than a house whether or not it is haunted. So for each dated haunted building I asked: what share of listed buildings of the same kind are older?
The median haunted building sits at the 45th percentile of its kind (95% range 33 to 51), so slightly older than the typical listed building like it. 57% are older than the middle of their kind, which a coin would give with chance 0.272. Using only the 42 haunted buildings dated by Wikidata, the same source as the listed buildings, the median is the 38th percentile. Haunted houses are the clearest case: a median date of 1678 against 1757 for dated listed houses (chance 0.021). Haunted castles are no older than listed castles (median 1410 against 1350).
Age, in other words, nudges a building towards a ghost story, but it is not the story. The kind of building matters far more than its date, and some of the most famous haunted buildings are young: the Edinburgh Playhouse opened in 1929, and Carbisdale Castle was built between 1905 and 1917.
Inns are the one kind where age seems to matter a great deal. There are 37,982 pubs on OpenStreetMap in Great Britain, and only 7% of them stand within 50 metres of a Grade I, II* or Category A listed building. Of the 30 haunted inns, pubs and hotels I could place at the building, 18 do (60%; chance below 0.001). The haunted pub is the old coaching inn on the market square, not the estate pub on the bypass.
A caution: a pub that has its own Wikipedia article is already unusual, and an old, listed pub is far more likely to have one. Some of this is a filter on what gets written about, and not only on what gets haunted. The same is true, less strongly, of every kind here: 98 of the 199 haunted buildings in Great Britain (49%) are themselves Grade I, II* or Category A listed.
If ghosts simply followed old notable buildings, each region would have about the same number of haunted places per listed building: 6.0 per 1,000 across Great Britain. Scotland has 13.3 (2.2 times what its listed buildings would predict, chance below 0.001). England has 4.6 and Wales 3.9.
The Scottish excess is a castle excess. 71% of Scotland's haunted buildings are castles or tower houses, against 10% of England's. Per hundred castles and tower houses in Wikidata, Scotland has 5.3 haunted ones, England 1.2 and Wales zero out of 826. Wales has plenty of castles; its castle ghosts have not reached this list.
What about the cities that call themselves the most haunted? Edinburgh has 16 places, 19% of Scotland's, but it also has 2,446 listed buildings, so it is about where its buildings predict (1.1 times). York, often called England's most haunted city, has just two (the Golden Fleece and the Treasurer's House), close to its expected 1.5. London has 18 (1.5 times). The real outliers are Oxford, with five (a lane, a footpath, a shoe shop and two hotels), and Southampton, with four places against 35 listed buildings. Those look like the work of keen local editors, which is exactly the kind of thing this data records.
I took the sentences around every mention of a ghost in each article and list entry (237 places have some), searched them for the stock characters of British ghost lore, and then read every match, removing 33 false hits (a "Queen Anne style" house is not haunted by Queen Anne). The counts are of places whose written story mentions each figure.
The ladies belong to castles and houses. 17 of the 67 castles with a ghost passage have a Grey, White, Green or other coloured Lady; of the 38 inns, zero. The Green Lady is Scottish: six of the seven green ladies are in Scottish castles (Ardblair, Balgonie, Fyvie, Knock, Stirling, Tulloch). The White Lady (13 places) is the commonest of the coloured ladies and the most widely spread.
Monks and nuns are English, and religious: 15 of the 19 places with a monk, friar or nun are in England and two in Scotland. They gather at religious sites (five of the nine churches and abbeys with a ghost passage, against 6% of other places, chance below 0.001), and at houses built on or near them, such as Burford Priory and Borley Rectory. All six headless or beheaded ghosts are English. The two drummers and pipers are in Scottish castles, Cortachy and Culzean. Poltergeists live in houses (five of seven). And the ghosts of the RAF stations, oddly, are rarely airmen in the text: only one of the eight military sites mentions one; the others mostly say only that a control tower or the site is said to be haunted.
I took every article in the English Wikipedia categories "Reportedly haunted locations in the United Kingdom", "... in England", "... in Scotland", "... in Wales" and "... in Ireland" (walked two levels down), every entry in "List of reportedly haunted locations in the United Kingdom" and "Reportedly haunted locations in Scotland", the Ireland section of "List of reportedly haunted locations", and the ghost sightings in "List of paranormal events reported in Wiltshire, England" (wikitext of 27 October 2026). The category walk also brought in 30 articles that are not places (regalia, regiments, people, events, lists, the whole London Underground) or that only sit in the Edinburgh Castle category; I removed them by hand. 203 places come from the categories and 57 only from the lists. 23 places carry the category but their article says nothing about a ghost.
189 places use the coordinates of their own article. 21 use a Wikidata item of the same building, 35 the town, village or feature their source names (from OS Open Names), and a few the Sites and Monuments Record for Ireland or a broader article. Four could not be placed. Every place's method and source is in data/haunted_places.csv.
Each place is given a kind by rules on its name and Wikipedia description, with hand corrections recorded in the code. The baseline is every Wikidata item designated Grade I, Grade II* (England and Wales) or Category A (Scotland) with coordinates, 40,409 items, of which 33,720 are buildings rather than walls, gates, bridges or monuments; kinds come from the Wikidata class, or from the name when the class is generic. Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland have no baseline here, so the comparisons use Great Britain only. Dates are Wikidata inception (P571) or the first year in the article's infobox ("13th century" read as 1250). Pubs are 37,982 OpenStreetMap pubs; castles are 1,063 Scottish, 948 English and 826 Welsh castles and tower houses in Wikidata.
Above all, this is Wikipedia's record of ghost stories, shaped by who writes about what. Places with articles are already notable, often listed and often open to visitors, and places that market their ghosts get written about. Grade II listed buildings, the great majority of listed buildings, are not in the baseline, so the baseline is the most important old buildings, not all old buildings. Wikidata's inception dates cover only a fifth of listed buildings and sometimes date the present building rather than the first one on the site; infobox dates are cruder still. The ghost cast is a text search on short passages, checked by hand for false hits but not for misses. Numbers in the small kinds (theatres, gaols, military sites) are tiny.